Like to wear comfortable clothes? Dislike sexism? Change your sex!

So I’m 19 right now and identify as female. Ever since I was younger I’ve always leaned towards the masculine side. I’ve always worn boys clothes, for as long as I can remember. When I was maybe 10/11, I would wear boxers and I felt very comfortable in them. When I reached 7th or 8th grade, I tried to start wearing female clothes. I never felt comfortable in girls underwear or shirts (I do usually wear girls jeans). When I was in 5th grade (elementary school) or maybe a little younger, I tried pushing for my parents to start calling me Joey after one of my favorite tv characters.

Fast forward a few years and I’ve recently come out as gay. I always wear boys clothes. I got a haircut and feel ten times more comfortable with it. She/her pronouns sort of make me uncomfortable, but I get embarrassed when people say he/him infront of my friends. I really lean towards the name Nick. I’ve always been big into video games and I’ll always make a male character, etc.

Recently I’ve been introduced to the Trans community and I’ve been watching a lot of videos on transitions so now I’m sort of confused with everything.

Some replies:

“Your experience sounds fairly typical of trans people”

And:

“You’re textbook trans”

Preferring comfortable clothes and short hair means you should change your sex.

I was assigned female at birth. However, I have never been comfortable living as a woman. Even as a young child, like in kindergarten, I hated wearing dresses and would throw tantrums if forced to. Eventually my parents stopped. My first boyfriend called me “secret Asian man” in fact because I have so many masculine traits– I am good at science and math, I like driving, I like fixing things, I like video games and am extremely good at them (better than most men), I play a very masculine instrument, etc, etc.

If you didn’t see me or know my name but were just told about me and my interests, you would think I was a man. I also HATE how being a woman is so limiting. I have been subjected to sexist discrimination, harassment, assault, the lot of it. I am fucking sick to death of it and I KNOW if I had been assigned male at birth, I would never have experienced it. I just lost a very good job because my boss wanted to sleep with me and I rebuffed him, which caused him to retaliate against me and when I complained, I was fired. I HATE living in this female body and I want a male one. I am just scared of coming out, honestly. Scared of what my family and friends will say. I feel like I would have to move to another city to truly be able to start over.

Hating dresses, being good at science, and playing a “very masculine instrument” – as if no women can do these things.

Top rated reply:

“trans with doubts doesn’t equal cis”

The poster further explains that part of what makes her dislike “being a woman” is the harassment she received for having unshaven legs:

When disliking harassment and preferring certain styles of hair and clothing is making people “question their gender” to the extent that they ask other people for advice about it, that says a lot about the narrow gender roles people are feeling confined by. Furthermore, it seems to be a wide consensus in the online trans communities that the act of questioning your gender itself means that you are trans. This sentiment is very pervasive.

Transcript from 00.30: “so first off, if you guys questioned it, um, you probably are transgender”

Enter a caption

According to the poster in the screenshot above, if you’re questioning that very likely means you are trans.

The first thing I want to talk about is the question of “How do I know I’m transgender?” being very, very big in and of itself and breaking it down in bits and pieces.

Let’s talk about how, if someone is even asking themselves that question it probably means, at the very least, they are feeling uncomfortable with their current gender role. So more than likely, the answer to that question (“Am I transgender?”) is “yes.”

If people are even asking the question, it means that more than likely they are transgender, according to this gender therapist.

So we have people growing up steeped in narrow gender roles, questioning their gender, and being told that the very act of questioning means they are transgender. Combine that with medical transition many places being trivially easy to obtain, and you have a situation where people are doing irreversible changes to their bodies on very flimsy grounds.

“questioning to fulltime in 9 months”“from questioning in may to hrt in september”“why wait?”“got my prescription within a month and a half”“questioning in June, Spiro and E in january”

Sexist gender roles + confused young people + the notion that questioning means you are trans + easy access to hormones = a rush of people modifying their bodies in rather extreme ways in order to fit in.

A woman can go by the name Joey (I remember a very conventionally-sexy female singer from the 60s named Joey Heatherton. She also had short hair)

A woman can cut her hair short, wear flannel shirts and jeans. Even boxers. Guys can have long hair. A shirt that on a woman is a tank top is, on a man, a “wifebeater”. Basically the same garment.

Wanting to do these things doesn’t mean a woman should – or must – consider being a man instead.

And gender-associated looks/behavior are not rigid over time. In some eras, men wore long hair and worried how their legs looked in tights. In some parts of Africa, all the women shave their heads. In ancient Egypt most people shaved their heads and wore wigs – women and men.

Before the current trans activist explosion, what made certain hair, clothes, interests “belong” to one sex or the other was basically what most of the members of that sex wore/did in a certain location. And there have always been outliers. I remember reading an autobiographical essay by a woman in late 19th century NYC who shaved her head just to freak people out (and enjoyed going in public to watch the freak outs) Joan of Arc cut her hair and put on men’s clothes and fought as a soldier (and never said she was, or wanted to be, a man)

It’s the trans activists who are trying to make the lists of “gender appropriate” hair styles, clothing, interests more rigid. I think most people I know don’t care which women – or men – have long hair, short hair, no hair, pants, skirts kilts.

You can be you, wear/do what you want and you don’t have to ask questions about sex/gender.

How about wanting a penis or a vagina? Or a flat chest or breasts? Does that make you trans? I subscribe to your idea that clothes and interests don’t really have a bearing on gender. Whatever makes you comfy but how about body issues like that? Also there is a difference between crossdressing (like Joan d’Arc) and being trans. They may overlap but they can also be exclusive. You can crossdress for whatever reason from simply liking it to deceiving others and not transition. However, often trans people crossdress as it is more comfy for them to be perceived as the opposite gender.
I am the fence about transitioning. One reason is that I don’t think interests and clothes and hairstyles have a bearing on gender but, on the other hand, I have always wanted a masculine body (flat chest, much more muscular and a penis).

If you think that to simply entertain a thought creates reality, you are engaging in some serious magical thinking. The counter here would be “hardly anyone believes they are really elephants, but lots of people believe they are really the opposite sex.”

Maybe not elephants, but there’s a whole furry community where people seriously believe they’re a cat or a fox. There’s some crossover with people that only wear the costumes because of a fetish, but a lot really ‘feel’ as if they were born in the wrong species.

As a psychopathologist I cannot tell the difference between their delusion and gender dysphoria. On all accounts it’s the same thing.

Even the gender therapist is telling people that if they’re questioning their gender, then they are trans — and they’re doing it on their website! No need to make an appointment and explore the possibility with the therapist over a series of visits, when instead the therapist can hand out the diagnosis via their website’s homepage based on the answer to one little question! FFS.

I agree. It’s one thing for the brainwashed dopes over on reddit to repeat popular fallacies, telling confused kids if they’re simply questioning their gender then they definitely are trans. But for a so-called professional therapist to do so? Dangerous.

Of course if this therapist is transgender himself (supposedly herself), as so many “gender therapists” are, then well, there you have it. He must work to spread his delusion far and wide, in order to gain more validation for himself.

This is why I’ve lost almost all respect for the therapist profession. And I did actually used to have a lot of respect for them because I had a good psychologist when I was a teenager, who helped me deal with all my angsty teenage phases and depression. So for a long time I have thought that therapy can be a good thing. And yes, there might be some therapists who haven’t drunk the gender Kool-Aid, but a lot of them have or are passively going along with it.

Would a therapist support any other life-altering decision without having met the person? For example, if someone said that they wanted to quit their good job with benefits and be a freelance agent because they were feeling burned out, wouldn’t a therapist talk to the person about it for a while, instead of just saying “great idea”. Also, for people who are thinking of divorce, a therapist doesn’t just give out cards to a divorce lawyers, but instead talks through the pros and cons of ending the marriage.

It’s like there’s no critical thinking at all. Why doesn’t anyone point out that there are plenty of women who like math and science? I have a science degree and the majority of my professors where women with PhDs in a STEM field. I would assume that they liked it well enough to get a PhD in it and they are definitely not dudes.

Also, I’m pretty sure that no one would like being fired from a job they were good at for refusing to sleep with the boss. She is not the only woman who has had this problem. When I was a teenager, I was jealous of my brother because he did not have pedophiles hitting on him when he hit puberty and he didn’t have periods. I used to have really painful periods before my doctor diagnosed me with a ton a reproductive health issues and started treating me for it. But, that didn’t make me a dude and I never wanted to be a dude.

By the way, what is a masculine instrument anyway? Is is anything vaguely phallic?

I used to play the church organ… is that… does the word ‘organ’ make it masculine… it’s big and loud… but also has a lot of decorative shit on it… does my gender maybe depend on what stops I use? Am I a woman if I prefer the flutey stops? Do oboe stops make me male?? I can deal with this. WHAT’S AN ACCORDION?

When I was a little girl, I liked legos, video games, and I enjoyed playing with boys and having sword fights with sticks. As I approached puberty, I got my hair cut and wished that I were a boy because it was freeing. Then I got over it because I realized that I could be a woman and still enjoy woodworking and wearing comfortable clothes. The fact that I found traditionally masculine activities freeing has much more to do with the limits of our highly gender stereotyped society than it does with some deep down feeling of gender identity.

Thank goodness I didn’t have reddit and tumblr to convince me that I’m a special snowflake that needed to cram myself into a box.